How to get on top of email

“EMAIL has become the biggest and worst interrupter the universe has ever experienced,” says Marsha Egan, a workplace productivity coach and the author of Inbox Detox and the Habit of E-mail Excellence. “It’s cheap, it’s immediate, and you can copy 200 people if you want to.”

It’s also, many would agree, a giant headache and time suck.

Most employees spend about 28% of the work week reading and answering emails, according to one analysis.

Maura Thomas, a speaker and trainer on individual and corporate productivity whose upcoming book is The Happy Inbox, says the first thing many of her clients do when they open their eyes in the morning is check their email. And the last thing they do before they go to bed at night is, you guessed it, refresh that inbox.

“It’s super unhealthy,” she says – sweet dreams are not made of subject lines and BCCS.

Part of taking control of our email, Thomas and other experts say, is establishing boundaries around it.

Preventing email overwhelm ¡ Check your email just a few times a day. In a perfect world, Jim Mccullen would check his email twice before lunch and twice after. If you want to adopt such a schedule, enlist some help. “Turn off automatic send and receive,” says Mccullen, the author of Control Your Day, which details an email productivity method. Of course, not everyone has the luxury of checking their email just a few times a day. One potential solution: If you want to make sure you receive emails from, say, your top boss, set up an inbox rule that will deliver that person’s notes to your phone as text messages.

¡ Adhere to the four Ds. Egan applies “the four Ds” to every email she receives: do, delete, delegate or defer. If you can deal with an email within two minutes, do it. If it’ll take longer, defer, which is also known as triaging. Egan puts such emails into Folder A, which stands for “action”, and then sets reminders to return to them. You might also delete an email or delegate it to someone else. The key is to deal with each message before you move on to the next, rather than letting 10 (then 100) pile up unread. Treat your inbox as a place to receive and process messages, not store them. (If you do need to hold on to emails, as is often the case at work, that’s fine. Just don’t keep them in your main inbox, experts say. Move them to a “reference” or “old emails” folder.)

¡ Turn off notifications. Do you really need an alert for each new message? “Let me just end the suspense for you,” Thomas says. “You have mail.” Constant pop-ups or dings “just contribute to your habit of distraction,” she says. “It makes it really difficult to stay focused for any period of time, and it chips away at patience.”

¡ Unsubscribe aggressively. Think of your inbox as a garden you must prune, Mccullen says. Those newsletters you haven’t opened in six months? Unsubscribe. The place you once bought a hamburger from that sends you deals every day? Unsubscribe. You can always check the website. Remember: Even looking at an email and deciding you don't need it steals valuable time, Mccullen says.

¡ Don’t obsess over Inbox Zero. Some people swear by this rigorous approach to keeping your inbox empty at all times. Forget it.